Solitary Wings
by Khiori
Summary: Shayera knows what truly lost the war for her people.


They didn't _understand_.

But then, how could they really?

They were children of the _land_ ; born to spend their lives crawling, walking, running. Everything about them was centered on the ground beneath their feet; their homes, their jobs, their societies, their countries. They fought for it and bled for it. And when they died, they were buried in it.

Truthfully, she knew they rarely even bothered to give any actual thought to what was right above them. Usually, in fact, didn't even _look_ up, content entirely in the occasional claustrophobic airplane ride to glance out a tiny porthole window or boast about a few minutes of artificial rush in a carefully orchestrated feigned freefall.

Only the ones who had the power of self air travel in their super lineup could _begin_ to almost sense that the hordes of humans beneath them were possibly _missing_ something, but even then, the realization of the absolute fullness of their true _loss_ still eluded them.

For they were only really temporary occupants of _space_ in the sky.

They flew through the air to reach a specific destination, they flew through the air to fight a specific battle, and they flew through the air to save a specific cause.

But that was all they did.

Fly _through_.

As if the sky was an _obstacle_ to overcome.

A thing _between_ them and their duty.

In fact, she wasn't sure which fate was actually _worse_.

The fate of those that never _looked_ up or the fate of those that only _went_ through.

She found it rather heartbreaking really.

They didn't _understand_.

Shayera was a child of the _sky_.

Her people spent their lives _there_.

Tiny children worked ferociously hard, beating their fledgling wings almost as if they were born starving _mad_ with the single minded drive to join their parents in the wind.

Juveniles teased and dove and sometimes tormented each other through the clouds, daring each other to more and more wild acrobatic chases until they literally fell out of the sky in spent exhaustion and had to be caught before they broke themselves in their foolish overextended _joy_.

Lovers flirted and whirled, danced and glided with each other, riding the rising warm thermals together wingtip to wingtip, _laughing_ as they snatched moments of tangled passion in exhilarating spins down.

Those who could no longer catch the wind themselves were snatched up by family or friends or even total strangers so they could shout _defiance_ of fate.

And those that knew their death was upon them, quietly and dignifiedly took one last triumphant flight, letting their hearts burst from the might of their final soaring effort in complete victorious _content_.

Her people spent _all_ their lives there.

Shayera thought now that was why the long war had destroyed them.

Because it took them _from_ their lives.

The war forced them to leave their beloved sky behind, to fight endlessly in ships _sealed_ tight against the empty void between the stars where there was no wind to ride. The war forced them to fight constantly on _feet_ in cramped airless dark corridors full of blood and horror. The war forced them generation after generation after generation to _leave_ further and further and further behind all they had ever known and ever loved.

Until somehow, somewhere, along the way, they gradually _forgot_ what it was to spend their lives in the sky.

And in the end, they could not withstand the terrible _loss_.

Shayera knew it twisted them slowly into an entirely different people.

Hard.

Cruel.

Selfish.

Destructive.

Lost from all they once _were_ in the brutal unrelenting war to just _survive_.

Which in eternal agonizing black irony was what in the ultimate end actually caused them to lose everything.

Because Shayera had found to her overwhelming grief when she looked into her heart, that she _could not_ save a people who had become like _that_.

Even when they were her own.

She found that rather heartbreaking, too.

Were any left now?

She didn't know.

She only knew that the strange beautiful glorious sky she'd learned to love was hers alone today.

And maybe every day thereafter.

So Shayera flew for the memory of _them_.

She leapt into the air with powerful frantic down sweeping pulls of her wings as if it were her first lunging desperate-for-sky childhood flight once more.

She chased fast moving white clouds as if her young shouting friends were hot on her feathers to catch her in their forever insane childhood games.

She swung hard about the thermals and dove and rose and dove and rose again as if she were clutching hungrily tight to _him_ once more in their fiery first mating passion.

She powered up through the blue her wings burning as if she alone were carrying the awful dragging weight of every one of her broken winged people in her arms, so they could feel the wind tear past them again.

And she flew faster and faster and faster, trying to make her blood roar and her heart burst with the sheer exhilaration of flying so if this were the last flight she ever had it would be _enough_.

Shayera flew today as if she were coming _home_ to the sky from a long and terrible absence and for the first time in her entire life, she felt completely and absolutely _alive_.

And _that_ was what she found was truly the most heartbreaking of all.

What made her weep and sob and _rage_ as she flew.

The bitter realization of what her people had _actually_ needed to save them. And the awful damning knowledge that it had come too late to do any good.

For the sky was utterly empty except for her solitary wings.

They had only needed to _remember_.

Remember how to _understand_ the sky.


End file.
